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Home > Integrating Labor History into the U.S. History Curriculum
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Integrating Labor History into the U.S. History Curriculum
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by Bill Barry
Community College of Baltimore County
Dundalk, Maryland
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The Rise and Decline of the Labor Movement
Including labor history in a U.S. history survey course, however briefly, offers the opportunity for both students and teachers to look at history, historiography, and their own lives in dramatically different ways. Labor history is immensely relevant for students today because it shows how workers dealt with change, including new technology and disappearing jobs, and problems of class, race, gender, and ethnicity -- in short, how American workers over the past four centuries dealt with the same problems we're up against in the twenty-first century.
The importance of unionism to American history is a subject of great debate today, in particular because of a decline in the working class's standard of living and a relentless global economy. Since "union jobs" pay an average of 35 percent more than similar "non-union" jobs, it is clear that the strong union movement -- in combination with factors such as the post-World War II economic boom, massive government spending, and the rise of new consumer spending -- helped bring about a rising standard of living for millions of Americans in the post-1945 period. At one time, almost 40 percent of American workers were represented by a union, a membership figure that dropped dramatically by 2003 to 9 percent of private-sector workers. Ironically, the union movement created the cultural and social mobility that has since led many historians to proclaim that the class system in the United States had been dissolved by the very organizations that grew from the depths of class disparities.
The rise of the labor movement is also significant for the political activism it promoted during different periods of American history. Union members fought for legislation that would enhance the strength of their own organizations, from court cases like Commonwealth v. Hunt (1827), which recognized the legitimacy of unionism for the first time, to the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, a reflection of the rise of the role of the federal government.
At the same time, unions worked for laws that would benefit all citizens in ways that hold enormous relevance to students today. In the early 1830s, for example, the nascent union movement demanded free public education. A hundred years later, unions fought for passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, bringing the first minimum-wage law -- under which many students work -- into existence. Subsequent laws that provided overtime pay, safety and health regulations, and protection against racial and sexual harassment, were also products of labor's political action.
Labor History and Workers' History
It is helpful to consider two major historical conceptions of American work: "labor history" and "workers' history." Labor history, developed in the late nineteenth century by John R. Commons at the crest of the Populist Movement, describes the development of workers' organizations in the United States and the institutional history of labor unions -- their structures, their struggles, and ultimately their accommodation of a powerful management class.
Some history curricula already include elements of labor history, covering, for example, the controversy over the Pullman strike of 1894. One unit, from Midwest Publications/Critical Thinking Press and Software, titled "Workers, Farmers, and Immigrants in the late 1800s" (1991), offers materials for class debates -- Perspective A and Perspective B -- about the "benefits" of working and living in the town of Pullman. These debate documents can be supplemented by a video, Palace Cars and Paradise, about the town of Pullman.
Assignments that deal with the "American character" could discuss Commons's statement in Trade Unionism and Labor Problems (1912): "Workingmen are combining and cooperating more and more; and the more they get intelligence, the more they get Americanized, the more they will combine. In this combination of workingmen they attempt to accomplish through collective power what they cannot accomplish as individuals." If U.S. history is presented as the triumph of individualism, here is a contrary opinion to celebrate collective action.
Following the development of unionism from the spontaneous worker groups (1700s) into craft unionism (1800s) and into industrial unionism (1900s) could illuminate Commons's statement. One good assignment follows the history of a local union, drawing upon the experiences of students, whose parents may be involved in the union. The assignment can combine the extensive written documentation that most unions maintain, with interviews of members and retirees as an example of historiography.
Workers' history, popularized in the United States by Herbert Gutman in the late 1960s, takes a broader view of history, looking at the lives of individual workers, their communities, and culture. In Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, Gutman attempts to rescue American workers from a "cocoon" of union history that separates workers "from their own particular subcultures and from the larger national culture."
How do the concepts of labor history and workers' history translate into different approaches in the classroom? A curriculum that emphasizes diversity will portray the history of unionism to be the history of a class, with its own race, gender, and ethnic concerns, while labor history gives students a background of the most dramatic elements of the confrontation between their lives and the demands of a global economy.
An excellent device for expanding the understanding of the two schools of history is the video A. Philip Randolph: For Jobs and Freedom. In it, the struggles of sleeping-car porters so clearly combine workers' rights (as employees) and civil rights (as African American men and women) in ways whose implications spread far beyond the Pullman company. Another video, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, combines labor history with workers' history from a feminist point of view.
Other Aspects of Labor History
The history of workers' organizations, from the temporary work groups of the colonial period to the massive union bureaucracies of today, is as vivid and bloody as any world war, but it often did not leave a "permanent" record. For the most part, workers' history in the United States has been a history of people who can barely read and write, and who maintained their history in conscious ways -- through the oral history tradition, for example -- and unconsciously, by saving snippets of their lives, like pay stubs and union books. Studying labor history offers a wide variety, then, of historical source material.
Oral history assignments about labor can inspire students to begin projects involving their own relatives or work experiences, so they become active creators and recorders of history, rather than simply passive readers. Students can also discover wonderful local historians, who research everything from family and community histories to industrial archeology.
I created a local labor history project involving steelworkers in Baltimore, and allowed students to go out and interview their neighbors, their relatives and -- in the case of workers from the plant -- their coworkers. When I present the project to local high school students, I ask them to submit written questions that bring them abruptly into major social issues. Typical questions include: What will happen to people who lose their jobs? How do people live without health insurance? Does manufacturing have a future in this country?
A shrewd history teacher will include slavery and the plantation system in a discussion of labor history, because plantations were simply a variant of the factory system -- "lords of the lash and loom" -- with similar organizations and separate cultures among the slaves. Understanding the conflicts between slave labor and free labor will also help the students make the essential connection to racism today, and the apparently irrational conflicts between the poor of different races.
In labor history, the prevalence of segregated unions, and the culture of racism and separation, is an important, though sordid, element to follow. Separate seniority lists that restricted black workers to the dirtiest jobs, for example, were fixtures in union contracts and were not eliminated, in many cases, without government intervention. The economically depressed eastern Baltimore County area has experienced a long-running conflict over providing Section 8 housing vouchers for workers displaced from public housing projects in Baltimore City. In a conflict of stereotypes, white workers in this declining area strongly resent the arrival of "those people" into previously segregated neighborhoods.
Labor History and Class in America
Finally, labor history can be used as a springboard for important discussions of patterns in American history. There is a growing perception that the United States is divided into two very distinct classes: in 1980, a chief executive earned 40 times a worker's wage, while by 2003, the chief executive earned 500 times a worker's wage. That issue can lead to provocative discussions on the value of protectionism, for example, as opposed to free trade and global outsourcing. It can be used to help show how current political events -- the debates in recent presidential campaigns, for example -- can be scrutinized for echoes of debates in the distant historical past.
Bill Barry has been the labor studies program director at the Community College of Baltimore County since 1997. Recognizing the importance of labor history and its general omission from most history courses, he developed new content and instructional methods. He regularly speaks at area secondary schools and works with teachers on expanding curricula. His current project is a history of the steelworkers at the Bethlehem Steel Works at Sparrows Point, Maryland. He has published reviews in The Maryland Historical Review and The Labor Studies Journal, and is preparing an article on the steelworker project for Labor's Heritage.
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